With its shattering cadence of studded heels and sweaty palms, Andalusian culture resonates here and there in the metropolis. Despite the silence of two years of forced stop, flamenco regains its rights without having lost its original luster. The ingenuity and charisma of its ambassadors have acted as a shield in the face of the health crisis. “Le Devoir” spoke with one of them, Rocío Vadillo, singer and dancer, who transposes her codes to the Montreal dimension.
Like its Spanish flamenco peers, the movement is part of the “life lines” of Chiíto, diminutive of Rocío. As a child in Cordoba, Andalusia, she was introduced by her grandmother to the “fandango”, the dance space of all possibilities. Both a theater of insults and praise. “You should know that flamenco was a guarded art during the reign of Franco’s dictatorship. It was a form of popular outlet for criticizing the regime through the double meaning of the words,” underlines the one who revisits her southern Spanish imagination during her trances on stage.
From one crisis to another
After a stint in Paris, the young woman settled down in Montreal four years ago. “Because of the economic crisis in Spain, the situation of artists has become precarious. We have been witnessing their exit from the country for fifteen years. Here Rocío finds an impressive number of compatriots around whom to create a flamenco community. A city at the height of its desire to concretize its creations, in the company of extraordinary musicians and artists. It turned out to be an idyll until the unstoppable pandemic episode.
Rude memory for the flamenco dance teacher. Suddenly, it was impossible to teach in one or other of the schools where she transmitted her Andalusian fire, among others at Collège Sainte-Anne in the college dance-studies program for 13 and 14-year-old girls. The only way, unusual: online courses. For the mother of three children, developing this format in a restricted environment was not easy. Nevertheless, Rocío manages to offer such sessions in his daily setting and, thus, avoid the economic and psychological chasm. In four years of teaching on the island, his pool of students remains faithful to him, with some departures which are justified, in the nomadic philosophy of the artist. She insists on staying in communion with each of her budding dancers. “Tell me your news, even if you are going to dance somewhere else! Knowing several flamenco masters constitutes an experiment to which I lent myself,” she recalls, candidly.
Notebooks of nomadism
The global health crisis will trigger a revival of songwriting in Chiíto. A muse that ran through his head over the course of his travels over the past fifteen years. Meticulously recorded in his notebooks, his songs have traveled everywhere with the artist. Starting from his beloved Andalusia, these compositions then took the road to Madrid and the City of Light to arrive in Montreal. This is how the room Between Boxes will emerge, wrapped in the guitar of his sidekick Jheinsen Montalvo. “Locked up by the pandemic, I started composing songs about the time when I lived in Paris. When I took the subway, I saw an old gentleman on a cardboard box, very well dressed with his stick, and I wondered: is he there of his own free will? We tend to lower our gaze in discomfort”, expresses the sensitive morena. A music video was made in the streets of Montreal during this parenthesis away from the stage.
Gradually returning to the enclosure of the dance studio where she is queen, Rocío Vadillo feels a deep surprise. Like a romantic date put on hold. On June 25, at Café Kawalees — a rare cultural cabaret of Arabic inspiration — she met up with her accomplices from the Cabaret Flamenco de Montréal, singer Fernando Gallego Torres, originally from Cadiz, and a promising new voice, Chicha. With as a geographical framework Córdoba, Cadiz and Americathe siblings played out the dark hours of the crisis.
Clear the soil
Inexhaustible, Rocío is preparing for his return to school with an offer of courses and performances under his artist name Chiíto. In parallel with the holding of some summer courses, the young woman is looking for new places to measure for the performances. A quest in itself, in a city where there are barely a dozen spaces suitable for shattering art. Alvaro Echanove, flamenco artist and representative of the Cabaret Flamenco de Montréal — a flagship promotional organization for a decade — explains “the soil issue”. “The shoes with nails risk damaging the floors and the room managers are cautious. He evokes a certain misunderstanding of flamenco art in its raw Andalusian manifestation. “A lot of people too often confuse rumba or confuse the Gypsy Kings with our flamenco. It is an art requiring an interest in forms and its history, the knowledge of which falls into exoticism! Flamenco is not just about going into the crowd and clapping…”
Like a blaze, flamenco nights will never go out in Montreal, according to the two acolytes. A universal art, this vehicle of extreme emotions, of joy, heartache and distress, fascinates Quebecers all the way to the national capital. Standard-bearer of the flamenco movement, Michelle Fortin has been breathing Andalusian art since the 1990s. With her students from Flamenco Duende, she is preparing to offer a major performance at the MondoKarnaval festival, on September 3 at ExpoCité. “Among the 45 countries represented, we will represent Spain. This is a colorful and lively parade along a route through the streets of Limoilou, with stops for mini-performances of a few minutes. A bit like at the Carnival of Quebec…”, specifies the artist in love with sevillanas and flamenco tango. There are three flamenco dance schools in Quebec.
For his part, Rocío will give dance and singing lessons from August 23 at the Ballet Divertimento school. The artist meditates on the meaning of flamenco, according to the psychology of the Quebec people. “The strength of the flamenc makes it possible to exteriorize so many vibrations. It’s a great vector to get angry socially in a form of acceptance, without taboos. Here, we tend to avoid this conflicting energy which is nevertheless healthy, ”underlines the one who praises the tablao under her Montreal feet.